Inside the Making of Sinners: Michael B. Jordan Talks Twins, Trauma, and Transformation

Michael B. Jordan on playing twins in Sinners: The process of kind of like going from one character to the next, like, for me, it was a lot of, you know, music and catchphrases and things of that nature. A body position or a stance, you know, that. That I worked through to kind of establish the two of them and, you know, locking into that, you know, you know, day after day, you know, you start to create your own rhythm and routine. You know, Smoke wore his trauma differently. You know, he kind of closed up a bit. So, you know, Smoke is, you know, a man of few words. And that’s what we kind of understood a lot amongst identical twins. You know, usually, you know, you know, twin brothers that, you know, are around each other a lot, you know, you know, one is more dominant in certain areas than the other.

You know, if you’re always with your brother and, you know, your brother usually does most of the talking, you naturally don’t talk that much because, you know, your brother’s taking care of most of that. So finding out those little details was a lot of fun and very informing on just the process. But, you know, smoke, you know, had a heaviness to him that I kind of wore that took time to get off, you know, and Stack was a lot lighter. You know, he smiled through his pain, you know, he smiled through his trauma. He talked his way through it, you know, so he, you know, had a lot more things to do and say and to deflect, to not sit still and let those feelings and those traumas kind of catch up to him. So Stack was always kind of like, he’s always on the move, always. Always kind of fleeing from things. So, yeah, the process as a whole was just experimental, but by, you know, halfway through it, you know, it was a process that we saw all the way to the end.